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8 See, for example, Schiller’s poem, “The Gods of Greece” (The Poems of Schiller, Complete, trans. Henry D. Wireman [Philadelphia: I.G. Kohler, 1871]: 64–9), and Hölderlin’s Hyperion, or The Hermit in Greece, trans. Willard R. Trask (Hyperion and Selected Poems, ed. Eric L. Santner [New York: Continuum, 2002]: 1–133). The philosophical context and significance of all these figures and their relationships is discussed by Frederick C. Beiser in the first chapter of The Romantic Imperative: The Concept of Early German Romanticism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). See also Manfred Frank’s illuminating lectures on The Philosophical Foundations of Early German Romanticism, trans. Elizabeth Millán-Zaibert (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2004).
9 “Jeder sei auf seine Art ein Grieche, aber er sei’s,” in “Antik und Modern” (1818), Hamburger Ausgabe in 14 Bänden, vol. 12: Schriften zur Kunst, Schriften zur Literatur, ed. Erich Trunz and Hans Joachim Schrimpf (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1981), 176.
10 Winckelmann, Reflections, 5.
11 Winckelmann, Reflections, 33. Accounts of Laocoön’s ending differ, but Winckelmann has in mind the account in Virgil’s Aeneid, in which the serpents are sent by Minerva. The nobility and dignity of the sculptural figure, he says, is especially evident in contrast to the poetic representation. “He emits no terrible screams such as Virgil’s Laocoön […]; his pain touches our very souls, but we wish that we could bear misery like this great man” (Reflections, 35).
12 I take it up at some length in “The Legacy of Hellenic Harmony.” See also White, Individual and Conflict; Butler, Tyranny of Greece over Germany; Richard Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980); and Henry Hatfield, Aesthetic Paganism in German Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), esp. ch. 1, “Winckelmann and the Myth of Greece.”
13 Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece, 13.
14 White, Individual and Conflict, 11.
15 Butler asserts that Lessing’s Laocoön “entirely failed to counteract the influence of Winckelmann,” which was well established by the mid-1760s: “In vain had he cried ‘Havoc’, and let slip the dogs of war, the phrase ‘noble simplicity and serene greatness’ was too pervasive and too elusive to be run to earth. …The outstanding result of the labor performed in Laocoön was to make Winckelmann’s discovery of Greece much more widely known and even more dazzling” (Tyranny of Greece over Germany, 70). See Lessing, Laocoön: an Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, ed. Edward A. McCormick (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984).
16 See Herder, “Critical Forests, or Reflections on the Art and Science of the Beautiful: First Grove, Dedicated to Mr. Lessing’s Laocoön,” in Selected Writings on Aesthetics: Johann Gottfried Herder, trans. and ed. Gregory Moore (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 51–176.
17 J. J. Winckelmann, Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums. The History of Ancient Art I & II, trans. George Henry Lodge (Boston: James R. Osgood and Co., 1880); citations refer to Winckelmann’s book and chapter numbers in Roman type (or to his Preface), followed by section numbers in Arabic.
18 Winckelmann, History, Preface §1.
19 Winckelmann, History, Preface §3.
20 Winckelmann, History, Preface §4.
21 Winckelmann, History, Preface §21 (emphasis added).
22 In his conclusion to The Descent of Man (1871), for example, Darwin says, “False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often endure long; but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for everyone takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness: and when this is done, one path toward error is closed and the road to truth is often at the same time opened.” The Origin of Species and the Descent of Man (New York: Modern Library, 1936), 909.
23 Winckelmann, History, Preface §17.
24 Winckelmann, History, IV i §13. See also I iii §4: “The superiority which art acquired among the Greeks is to be ascribed partly to the influence of climate, partly to their constitution and government, and the habits of thinking which originated therefrom, and, in an equal degree also, to respect for the artist, and the use and application of art.”
25 Winckelmann, History, I iii §20 (see also §§16, 21).
26 Winckelmann, History, IV i §4.
27 Winckelmann, History, IV i §9.
28 Winckelmann, History, IV i §18.
29 Alex Potts, for instance, gets right this emphasis on internal rather than external or circumstantial freedom in Winckelmann; see his Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 54–60.
30 Winckelmann, History, IV i §§5, 18, 26.
31 Winckelmann, History, IV i §§23–4.
32 For instance, the “Oldest System-Program of German Idealism” (1796); I shall return to this curious document in what follows.
33 Winckelmann, History, IV i §20.
34 Winckelmann, History, IV i §5.
35 Winckelmann, History, IV i §19.
36 Winckelmann, Reflections, 9.
37 Winckelmann, History, IV i §8. Cf. Winckelmann, Reflections, 13: “The nude body in its most beautiful form was exhibited there in so many different, natural, and noble positions and poses not attainable today by the hired models of our art schools.”
38 “Thus we can say that in all probability their physical beauty excelled ours by far” (Winckelmann, Reflections, 11).
39 I am indebted to my colleague Louis Ruprecht for a fruitful discussion of the theme of freedom in Winckelmann’s History of Ancient Art, and for directing me to many helpful passages.
40 Winckelmann, History, IV i §34.
41 On the scholarly significance and reception history of Winckelmann’s History, see the first chapter of Potts, Flesh and the Ideal.
42 Johann Gottfried von Herder, Werke, ed. M. Bollacher et al. (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985–2000), vol. II, pp. 11–35. See the excerpt, “Older Critical Forestlet (1767/8)” in Johann Gottfried von Herder: Philosophical Writings, trans. Michael N. Forster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 257–67.
43 I shall return to this theme. For a brief and lucid account of Herder’s critical reflections on this theme, see Frederick C. Beiser, The German Historicist Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), ch. 3.5.
44 Hatfield, Aesthetic Paganism in German Literature, 116; see Goethe, “Winckelmann,” Hamburger Ausgabe in 14 Bänden, vol. 12, pp. 96–129.
45 Lloyd-Jones, Blood for the Ghosts, 57; citing Ernst Grumach, Goethe und die Antike (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1949), vol. I, p. 63.
46 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), A535/B563–A537/B565 (emphases added).
47 R. D. Miller, in Schiller and the Ideal of Freedom: A Study of Schiller’s Philosophical Works (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), offers a concise and eloquent account of Kant’s conception of freedom in the first and second critiques.
48 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Mary J. Gregor in Immanuel Kant: Practical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), AK 5: 3. In an important footnote to this passage, he goes further still. That the thought of a moral law presents itself to reason at all allows us to presuppose freedom; but there can be no serious question whether this presupposition is warranted. It must be, Kant argues, because “were there no freedom, the moral law would not be encountered at all in ourselves” (AK 5: 4n.).
49 Rebuking the “ancient Greek schools” in general, and Epicurus and his followers in particular, Kant insists in the Critique of Practical Reason that no matter how much rational calculation might be involved in one’s pursuit of the good life, the “principle of one’s own happiness […] still contains no determining ground for the will other than such as is suitable to the lower faculty of desire […].” Indeed, only “insofar as reason of itself (not in the service of the inclinations) deter
mines the will, is reason a true higher faculty of desire, to which the pathologically determinable is subordinate […]” (AK 5: 24–5). See also AK 5: 64 and 88 on “the ancients” and the lamentable heteronomy of their “cheerful enjoyment of life.”
50 See, for example, Critique of Practical Reason, AK 5: 80–1, 105–6.
51 Miller puts the point vividly when he says Kant’s terms “have a Puritan ring, [they] suggest that the weapon of moral freedom, forged in the interest of freedom, has been reversed, and is now attacking the cause it was fashioned to defend. It seems that Kant escapes the Scylla of ‘natural necessity’, only to fall victim to the Charybdis of moral tyranny. Like the horse of the Trojans, the moral law is welcomed into the citadel of freedom; it is hailed as a supernatural safeguard and palladium; but in the heart and center of freedom, unsuspected, the forces of tyranny lurk” (Schiller and the Ideal of Freedom, 49–50).
52 Schiller develops this view in “Über das Pathetische” (1793); “On the Pathetic,” in Friedrich Schiller: Essays, ed. Walter Hinderer and Daniel O. Dahlstrom (New York: Continuum, 1993).
53 Schiller, “Über Anmut und Würde”; “On Grace and Dignity,” in Schiller’s ‘On Grace and Dignity’ in Its Cultural Context: Essays and a New Translation, ed. Jane V. Curran and Christophe Fricker (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2005), 150.
54 Schiller, “On Grace and Dignity,” 155.
55 Schiller, “On Grace and Dignity,” 158.
56 Schiller, Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen (1795). On the Aesthetic Education of Man, trans. E. M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 13: 87 (emphases added). Cited by letter number and page.
57 Miller, Schiller and the Ideal of Freedom, vii. See also Frederick C. Beiser’s excellent study, Schiller as Philosopher: A Re-Examination (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), 213.
58 Beiser, Schiller as Philosopher, 215 (emphasis added).
59 Kant, Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht. Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. Mary J. Gregor (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974).
60 Schleiermacher, “Early Writings,” 16. Quotations from Schleiermacher’s review are translated by Jacqueline Mariña, “A Critical-Interpretive Analysis of Some Early Writings by Schleiermacher on Kant’s Views of Human Nature and Freedom (1789–1799), with Translated Texts,” in Schleiermacher on Workings of the Knowing Mind, ed. Ruth Drucilla Richardson (Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1998): 11–31.
61 Schleiermacher, “Early Writings,” 17.
62 Schleiermacher, “Early Writings,” 25 (emphasis added).
63 “It’s equally fatal for the mind to have a system and to have none. It will simply have to decide to combine the two” (Schlegel, “Athenaeum Fragments,” 53). Friedrich Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991); quoted by section and fragment number.
64 Winckelmann, Reflections, 21.
65 Quotability aside, the fragment should in this context be recognized as constituting an independent literary form, important in its own right and distinct from, e.g., the aphorism. Rodolphe Gasché’s foreword to Friedrich Schlegel’s Philosophical Fragments offers a lucid explanation of the coincidence of form and content in Schlegel’s style, and a helpful account of what it owes to Kant and how the Romantic conception of the presentation of ideas differs from the Idealists’.
66 Schlegel, “Athenaeum Fragments,” 242 (emphases added). This fragment is in fact one of Schlegel’s longest.
67 David Farrell Krell gives a lively account of the ongoing philological dispute surrounding this text, along with a reproduction of the original, for which he offers both translation and commentary, in “The Oldest Program Towards a System in German Idealism” (The Owl of Minerva 17.1 [1985]: 5–19). But for a provocative and, in my view, compelling case in favor of Hölderlin’s ownership of the ideas expressed in the fragment, see Eckhart Förster, “‘To Lend Wings to Physics Once Again’: Hölderlin and the ‘Oldest System-Programme of German Idealism’” (European Journal of Philosophy 3.2 [1995]: 174–98); the article includes as an appendix an English translation by Taylor Carman (European Journal of Philosophy 3.2 [1995]: 199–200). The literature on this fragment has focused (perhaps undeservedly much) on the vexed question of its authorship; to avoid privileging the question here, I cite Carman’s translation.
68 The fragment picks up with the words “…an ethics,” making it clear that what we have is a half-document: “In 1913 the Prussian State Library purchased at auction from the Liepmannsohn firm of Berlin a single folio sheet covered recto-verso with a text written unmistakably in the young Hegel’s hand. …This folio sheet, measuring roughly 21 x 33.5 centimeters, was apparently the second half of a Bogen or large, vertically folded sheet of foolscap, so that its opening words, eine Ethik, were actually the concluding words of a sentence begun on the first (missing) half of the foolscap” (Krell, “Oldest Program Towards a System,” 6).
69 “Oldest System-Program,” 199.
70 For a helpful account of Hölderlin’s influence on Hegel and Hegel’s changing notion of freedom—particularly his turn away from a Kantian conception and (gradually) toward a notion of freedom as reconciliation—see Terry Pinkard’s biography, Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), esp. 133–9, 141.
71 “Oldest System-Program,” 199.
72 “Oldest System-Program,” 199.
73 “Oldest System-Program,” 200.
74 For another convincing argument for Hölderlin’s ownership of the ideas in the “System Program,” see Nathan Ross, “The Mythic Grounding of Practical Philosophy in Hölderlin’s On Religion,” Idealistic Studies 37.1 (2007): 15–28. Looking carefully at Hölderlin’s essay, Ross finds a satisfying explanation for the indispensability of mythic poetic discourse for grounding practical ideals, as well as an account of how such mythology arises out of the experience of a whole culture.
75 G. W. F. Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts. Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen Wood, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Cited by paragraph number.
76 Hegel was not the only thinker to suspect that German philhellenism was as much an obstacle as a source of inspiration, of course. Goethe, as we have seen, had already harbored similar suspicions, and even Friedrich Schlegel, who was clearly more attracted than Hegel to the Hellenic ideal, had expressed the same worry: “The mirage of a former golden age is one of the greatest obstacles to approximating the golden age that still lies in the future” (“Athenaeum Fragments,” 243).
77 G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte. The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: American Home Library Company, 1902), 334.
78 Hegel, Philosophy of Right §185; for this summary of the “Chinese character,” see Philosophy of History, 202–3.
79 Hegel, Philosophy of History, 334.
80 Alan Patten, Hegel’s Idea of Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 4.
81 Patten, Hegel’s Idea of Freedom, 59; see Hegel, Philosophy of Right §185.
82 There is a good deal more to be said about the ways in which Greece’s legacy shaped developments in Idealist traditions after Kant and about its reception in German Romanticism; I take up each of these topics specifically in sections IV and V of “The Legacy of Hellenic Harmony,” 610–18.
83 With J. J. Reiske (1716–74) and Lessing in mind, Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff observed in his Geschichte der Philologie (1921), “It is an inspiring thought that so many of our best men worked their way up from the bottom, and that hardship only nerved them for the struggle. Winckelmann also had to draw to the dregs the bitter cup of want and humiliation before he found his way to Rome” (History of Classical Scholarship, trans. Alan Harris [Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982], 95–6).
84 Sir John Edwin Sandys, A Short History of Classical Scholarship from
the Sixth Century B.C. to the Present Day (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1915), 288–9; the historical sketch I offer here is especially indebted to chs. XXXVI—XXXVII. Sandys’ Short History is a charming, and more digestible, abbreviated version of the monumental original three-volume, 1600-page study on which Wilamowitz also relied in writing his History. It was, he said, “the only book on its subject worth mentioning, and is a work of solid learning; it is indispensable” (History of Classical Scholarship, 3).
85 Citing F. Klingner, Lloyd-Jones points out that Heyne “was the first to entertain the comprehensive notion of the study of the ancient world which was to become general during the nineteenth century. In Heyne’s hands that study was directed to a humanistic end; but at the same time he insisted on proper attention to detail, and his influence must have helped to protect Humboldt against an excess of theorizing” (Blood for the Ghosts, 63).
86 Herder, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit. Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man, 2nd ed., trans. T. Churchill (London: J. Johnson, 1803), vol. II, 117.
87 Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Geschichte der Philologie (1921). History of Classical Scholarship, trans. Alan Harris (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 1.
88 Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Reden und Vorträge (Berlin: Weidmann, 1913), 114.
89 Bernard Reginster, The Affirmation of Life: Nietzsche on Overcoming Nihilism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), aims at a “systematic” reading of Nietzsche’s corpus oriented around Nietzsche’s preoccupation with the problem of nihilism.
90 F. Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morality, trans. Maudemarie Clark and Alan J. Swensen (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998), III 8; cited by treatise and aphorism number.
91 Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morality, I 12 (Nietzsche’s ellipses).
92 Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Walter Kaufmann in Basic Writings of Nietzsche (New York: Modern Library, 1966), §23.